Malware Gangs Unite to Spread their Net Worldwide

Now that several malware groups are traveling across national boundaries and making news worldwide, the market for these unlawful occurrences is fast becoming similar to an open source class.

According to the assumption reached by Thomas Holt, University of North Carolina's professor of criminal justice, the market for Trojans, rootkits, and other malevolent programs gradually goes beyond national borders, reported by The Register on January 17, 2008. In many ways, malware design imitates source code groups, wherein host of coders across the world finetune each other's program to incorporate latest features and patch flaws.

It appeared to be contradictory to the typical viewpoint of a cyber-terrorist, stated Holt, who offered his conclusions on January 17, 2008 to military and police officials at the United States Defense Department Cyber Crime Conference.

Professor Holt and a group of investigators have been surfing Internet sites, Internet Relay Chatrooms (IRC) and different cyber forums where malicious software is talked about to discern what exactly makes it so beneficial to be in touch with cyber-terrorists worldwide.

They discovered that the circulation of Try2DDoS, a program that automatically starts the operation of Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) strikes, was initially issued in June 2005 outside France and within the following couple of years, a software with the identical name turned up in Argentina, Guatemala, China, and Russia.

The report contains significant lessons for police officers and also for those on the forefront of computer security, to be precise: that it's frequently hard to identify the main designer of a bit of malware that is circulating. Moreover, it especially establishes that malware assumes a separate existence after it is issued for distribution. Hunting down a hacker or gang behind its design doesn't denote that there are chances of the crimeware disappearing.

Gangs of cyber criminals are depending on each other for support, said Mr. Holt. It's no more just a one-man show circulating malware. At present, there seems to be several gangs involved with a well laid out distribution of work.

He has discovered a way of keeping track of these schemes, by visiting social networking websites, which time and again turn out to be very rewarding since cyber-terrorists put information online for browsers to perceive.

Related article: Malware Authors Turn More Insidious

» SPAMfighter News - 1/24/2008